Typical Dream Themes in a Large Internet Sample: A Replication and Extension

Typical content themes in dreams still defy clear explanation. While a series of studies administering typical dream theme questionnaires mainly to college students point to a surprising consistency in the prevalence of such themes over gender, age, culture, and time, it is still unclear how generalizable such findings are to the larger population. We used a validated online questionnaire, the Typical Dreams Questionnaire (TDQ), to assess the responses of 30,686 individuals who varied in age (10-85 years), gender, and student status. Results replicated several findings from an earlier study with a much smaller sample size. This included strong evidence that the number of typical themes reported decreases with age, that the prevalence of some themes differs between males and females, and that the questionnaire items tend to group into a smaller number of factors similar to those found in the previous study. Overall evidence of strong rank-order correlations between different groups (males/females; students/non-students) for such a large sample suggests that this version of the TDQ is highly generalizable to the larger population.